Well I have a UK Xbox 360 and UK live account

Set my 'locale' settings to Singapore

Followed this guide (well my friend did who is better at routers / DNS setting etc than me)

http://thaweesak.com/2007/04/19/xbox-live-in-malaysia/

and I did manage to play a few games with people from Korea and Japan so I guessed I was connecting to a better server than UK

Now I seem to be playing people from france and UK again - but not sure if the settings have changed back on their own.

I only ever get 1 red bar or maybe 2 yellow bars on my Xbox Live connection.

Anyone any tips on getting better connection speed?

I am dreading calling TOT, but I think I will have to soon - will they know what an xbox is even? will see - wanted to try here first.

I called UK XBOX help and they said that my UK Live account will be fine to use, I wont need to sign up for a new one - but that I may have to talk to my ISP and ask them for the best DNS settings - or the other advice was to buy a DNS in Sing - but I dont see any for sale, so not sure this was good advice.

DNS have nothing to do with speed, you can see this as you knocking on a door and asking the person behind what is his name, the inhabitant( the DNS ) replies fast or not, just because he replies in a certain amount of time doesn't mean he'll open the door quickly.

the only thing you might try to get better route/ping is to use a VPN.

we're not in the right part of the world to play online.

DNS have nothing to do with speed, you can see this as you knocking on a door and asking the person behind what is his name, the inhabitant( the DNS ) replies fast or not, just because he replies in a certain amount of time doesn't mean he'll open the door quickly.

the only thing you might try to get better route/ping is to use a VPN.

we're not in the right part of the world to play online.

thanks for the reply - I didnt expect to get one.

Yeah, I am no good at COD anyway, but think that combined with the fact that my connection is so bad that I might just forget about it - maybe i'll try online PC gaming and see if that is any better - just got a few games on the http://www.humblebundle.com/ 7 games for $5.64 including Saints Row The Third and Metro 2033 in case you are interested.

DNS have nothing to do with speed, you can see this as you knocking on a door and asking the person behind what is his name, the inhabitant( the DNS ) replies fast or not, just because he replies in a certain amount of time doesn't mean he'll open the door quickly.

the only thing you might try to get better route/ping is to use a VPN.

we're not in the right part of the world to play online.

Sadly this sums it up perfectly. Internet here just cannot cope with online gaming and such. I tried OnLive Desktop and it failed to even start up saying that my internet connection was not good enough and that was all I needed.

If internet speeds were good enough here for online gaming for consoles there would not still be PS2s in most shopping centres. Maybe some internet cafes have consoles but I am not sure they would be set up for online play, probably just local multiplayer only.